ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that the 'body of knowledge' of a profession is best understood as a 'landscape of practice' consisting of a complex system of communities of practice and the boundaries between them. Various practices have differential abilities to influence the landscape through the legitimacy of their discourse, or their control over resources. Regulators produce national policies and verify compliance with auditing practices. Developing the metaphor of a landscape of practice, first introduced in Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity, provides a broad social perspective on professional learning, and learning more generally. Learning in a community of practice is a claim to competence: it entails a process of alignment and realignment between competence and personal experience, which can go both ways. Learning as a social process always involves these issues of power. On our learning journey, engagement gives us direct experience of regimes of competence, whether our engagement is a visit or a lifetime commitment.
